As enterprises accumulate increasing amounts of operational business data,
developers must find new ways to make that data useful at every level of a
business. In this interview, Business Objects' Colin Gray discusses the value
of business intelligence dashboards as a decision support tool.

An often neglected byproduct of business process automation is the operational
data the automation system generates and accumulates over time. Log files,
transaction records, document archives, and virtually any sort of historic data
can become useful competitive tools if used to measure and improve a process.
Recent legislation mandating strict data archiving has only increased the types
and amount of data available to businesses.

New techniques have been introduced in recent years to help
companies make better use of that data. In this interview with Artima, Colin
Gray, Director of Developer Marketing and Americas Marketing at Business Objects, describes one such
innovation, business intelligence dashboards:

Dashboards enable a customer to take large amounts of data in an organization
that has [come about] as a result of running the business, and look at it in a
summary format. They can take key performance indicators for that business, and
put that in front of executives to help make decisions... The key players in an
organization get access to information in a format that's easy to read. They
don't have to look through lots pages of reports... if they see a speedometer
in the red, they know they have a problem and can make a very quick reaction,
whereas if it's buried on page four of a report, it can easily be missed...

The [information in these dashboards] can be divided into two categories. The
first is, How is the business running today? Do I have a problem today? The
other category might be, What if I changed this key performance indicator a bit?
What if I increased the price of the goods sold, or increased the salary
I'm paying my sales reps? How is that going to impact the business? Some
of the dashboards enable the users to interact with those variables, and to
change the key element, and then see what the result is in the dashboard.

Colin Gray, senior manager of developer marketing and Americas marketing at
Business Objects, talks about business intelligence dashboards, a new trend in enterprise reporting and analysis. (5 minutes 10 seconds)

What formats and techniques have you found most useful in presenting summary
operational data to business managers? What do you think of the concept of
business intelligence dashboards?

About the authors

Frank Sommers is Editor-in-Chief of Artima Developer. He also serves as
chief editor of the IEEE Technical Committee on Scalable Computing's
newsletter, and is an elected member of the Jini Community's Technical Advisory
Committee. Prior to joining Artima, Frank wrote the Jiniology and Web services
columns for JavaWorld.

Bill Venners is president of Artima, Inc. He is author of the book,
Inside the Java Virtual Machine, a programmer-oriented survey
of the Java platform's architecture and internals. His popular columns
in JavaWorld magazine covered Java internals, object-oriented design,
and Jini. Bill has been active in the Jini Community since its
inception. He led the Jini Community's ServiceUI project, whose
ServiceUI API became the de facto standard way to associate user
interfaces to Jini services. Bill also serves as an elected member of
the Jini Community's initial Technical Oversight Committee (TOC), and in
this role helped to define the governance process for the community.